As I mentioned earlier, we were making some upgrades in the tree system last night and encountered bugs that took us many hours to work through. Our only solution was to take down the trees to fix the problem. The solution took much longer than we and many of you would have liked, but we believe the problems have been resolved.

If you have problems accessing your family tree on the site, try restarting your browser or clearing your cache. To clear your cache, please see the instructions in the Ancestry.com Help page at http://bit.ly/76G7CA.

We truly value your patience as we worked through these issues. Now – happy tree climbing!

Be assured that the information in your family tree is safe and will be available when the maintenance is completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and will keep you posted.

Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE AS OF MAY 19, 2010 AT 12:30 pm MT

I wanted to again let everyone know that we are still actively working behind the scenes to get the Ancestry Member Trees system up and running again. Though the trees are not currently available on the site, I wanted to make sure it was clear that searching our historical records collections hasn’t been impacted – so you can search all you want.

I’ll keep you posted as we have more details and appreciate your continued patience.

UPDATE AS OF MAY 19, 2010 AT 2:30 pm MT

A number of members have asked for more details about the problems we’ve been experiencing today with Ancestry Member Trees.  Unfortunately, as we were doing some big tree system upgrades overnight last night we found some unexpected bugs. We’ve had to take down the trees system to fix the problem.

We do routine maintenance on off-hours to minimize the impact on the time our customers carve out to do family history research. This type of maintenance is generally done behind the scenes to make the site better and usually happens without glitches. This was unfortunately not one of those times.

Based on current estimates, trees will likely continue to be down for the next several hours, at least until sometime later tonight (MT time). Please know that our development and web operations teams are working hard on the problem and we will have it resolved as quickly as we can.

UPDATE AS OF MAY 19, 2010 AT 9:15 pm MT

We’re still working on the issue with Ancestry Member Trees. We will continue working on it into the night and will let you know when we have more news to share.

The Ancestry.com site (and its related Ancestry international sites) will undergo scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 starting at 1am Mountain Time (7am GMT).  We expect Ancestry.com and its related international sites to be down for about 3 hours.  During this same period, portions of the Rootsweb.com, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com & familytreemaker.com sites will also be unavailable.  Thanks for your patience as we improve our infrastructure to keep our sites running smoothly.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we are spending a lot of effort behind-the-scenes to upgrade this system so that it will continue to meet customer needs as it grows.  As part of this effort, we will be upgrading some software on the servers that house this system.  These servers also support Genealogy.com and Rootsweb.com.

The third and most involved piece of the upgrade will occur early Wednesday morning from 12 to 8am MST.  During this part of the upgrade we anticipate the following impacts:

• Genealogy.com – Whole site will be down from 12 to 8am MST
• Rootsweb.com & Ancestry.com – Rootsweb’s WorldConnect and its sister database, Ancestry World Tree, will be down from 12 to 8am MST
  

Just to repeat, the outages related to Rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com will be limited to the WorldConnect and Ancestry World Tree systems only.  Ancestry Member Trees (our main tree system) will not be impacted.

 This is part 3 of 3 planned maintenance windows to complete this upgrade:

           Part 1 – Friday, 20 February 2009 – COMPLETE

           Part 2 – Tuesday, 24 February 2009 – 12:00 – 8:00 a.m. MST  — COMPLETE

           Part 3 – Wednesday, 25 February 2009 – 12:00 – 8:00 a.m. MST

Regards

Eric Shoup

As I mentioned last week, we are spending a lot of effort behind-the-scenes to upgrade this system so that it will continue to meet customer needs as it grows.  As part of this effort, we will be upgrading some software on the servers that house this system.  These servers also support Genealogy and Rootsweb.

We will perform the second part of this upgrade early Tuesday morning from 12 to 8am MST.  We may determine that we need to take down Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com and/or Rootsweb.com but at this point we do not anticipate having to do so.  It is possible that during the 3am to 8am MST timeframe on Tuesday you may see some degraded performance of the Trees system.

 This is part 2 of 3 planned maintenance windows to complete this upgrade:

           Part 1 – Friday, 20 February 2009 – COMPLETE

           Part 2 – Tuesday, 24 February 2009 – 12:00 – 8:00 a.m. MST

           Part 3 – Wednesday, 25 February 2009 – 12:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

I will post again to notify you about part 3.

Regards

Eric Shoup

During the maintenance window we may determine that we need to take down Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com and/or Rootsweb.com but at this point we do not anticipate having to do so.

 This is part 1 of 3 planned maintenance windows to complete this upgrade:

           Part 1 – Friday, 20 February 2009 – 1:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

           Part 2 – Tuesday, 24 February 2009 – 12:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

           Part 3 – Wednesday, 25 February 2009 – 12:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

I will post again to notify you of parts 2 & 3 as we get closer.

Regards

Eric Shoup

1. Compression: Across the site we’ve compressed the code that has to be downloaded with each page.  Our initial tests show that this has reduced “page weights” (or number of bytes you download when you hit a page) by almost 50%.  The improvement is more or less on a given page but it appears to be roughly 50% in aggregate across the site.  We have begun this process with our javascript and stylesheet files.  We are continuing on to our images and HTML files.

2. Photo Serving: We’ve moved the serving of member-contributed photos to a set of beefier, dedicated servers to ensure this system is getting sufficient resources.  This system comes into play anytime we display member photos like in the pedigree view or on person pages.

3. Reducing Duplicate Calls: On a few pages, we have reduced the number of times where key software libraries (code used to construct the site) are downloaded more than once.  Fewer requests to download libraries means faster page load times.  We are working our way through more pages like this on the site.

I’ll repeat — we are by no means done.  The Site Performance team is working on a number of further optimizations.  To summarize it, we are working on other ways to reduce the size of the data that is being transferred between us and you and improving our server response time.

We’ll report back as we make further improvements.  Have a good weekend.

regards

Eric Shoup

Maintenance will begin on Friday, 6 February 2009 at midnight (MST) and finish on Saturday, 7 February 2009 at 8:00 a.m (MST).  This maintenance windows is in effect for all Ancestry sites.  Assuming everything goes as planned, this maintenance should not impact your site experience at all.  I wanted to let you know this was happening but, again, we do not expect it to impact the operation of any of our Ancestry sites.

regards,

Eric Shoup

Sorry for the delay in getting this information out to you as well as any inconvenience this may have caused.

Regards

Eric Shoup
VP Product